“Sky,” I said. “Call me back when he’s with you, okay? I need to do something right now.”
We hung up, and then I turned to the ultrasound screen and snapped a photo of the shot the doctor had taken. I sent the picture to Eric with the caption. We miss you.
Then I called his phone, which, of course, went straight to voicemail after two weeks in a box.
“Eric,” I hiccupped. “I know you won’t get this for a while, but…oh, Eric, I’m at the doctor’s office. And I saw her. It. Whatever she is, but her, I heard her heartbeat! She’s just…oh my God, Eric, she’s only a little peanut, but she was real, you know? And I…God, I’m so sorry you’re not here, but I swear, as soon as I find my mom, I’m coming home. We are coming home to you. I’m staying safe, I promise, and I’m so glad that you’re safe now too. Get some new security since I stole yours, okay? Promise me that you’ll keep yourself safe until we’re together.”
I paused, took a deep breath, and then continued with the words we often found so hard to say to each other. Words I had always struggled to accept clearly when he had said them, but which I desperately wanted to hear. As I stared at the picture of my daughter or son, I knew I didn’t want to continue in that tradition. I wanted to be the kind of person who was open with my heart. For her. For him. For my family.
“Eric,” I whispered. “I-I love you. I love you so damn much, and I promise you that once I come back, I am never leaving you again. I’ll stop calling you Petri dish. I won’t force you to eat kimchi on everything. And I won’t run. I just want us to be a family, because that is what we are. I promise you. I just need to get all of that family back, okay?”
I paused again, realizing the idiocy of talking to a machine like it was going to talk back.
“I love you,” I said once more, then took a breath and repeated it one last time for good luck. “I love you. Like the water I drink. Like the air I breathe. Corny, I know, but I’ll come home to you soon and let you write the poetry. I promise.”
Then, reluctantly, I hung up. The words weren’t enough, but they were all I could offer. I’d come up with more one day. I’d try it every day for the rest of my life if it would help him know what he really meant to me.
“Touching. Very touching.”
I screamed at the sound of a deep, sonorous voice. From behind the thick door stepped a tall, familiar form.
John Carson, looking like the grim reaper himself in pure black and a black trench coat with the collar turned up on both sides, separated the curtains and entered the room, followed by two stocky Asian gentlemen and another tall white man with a hooked nose.
“Daughter,” he greeted me. His voice was calm as he took in the room and the pictures on the table.
I scrambled immediately into the far corner. “What—what the hell are you doing in here?” I looked beyond him. “How did you get past my security?”
“I hear you and that pathetic excuse for an investigator were looking for me.” Carson turned the monitor so he could have a better look at the picture, examining it with distant interest, like he was evaluating a map or a blueprint. He turned back. “He found me, of course. But he shouldn’t have.”
And that, I realized, was as close to an admission of Lawrence Kim’s murder as I was going to get. I looked longingly at my purse, wishing I could grab my phone.
“Get out,” I said with as much bravado as I could muster. “The doctor is going to be back any second too. And my security will wonder where I am.”
“Your security team was no match for a former KGB operative and the rest of my team, I’m afraid,” Carson replied, leaning toward the screen. “And your doctor, well, she is quite indisposed as well. Now, I’m not a medical professional, but I confess, I don’t see anything here. Do you have a cyst or something? Some kind of medical emergency?”
“I’m pregnant, you idiot,” I retorted, realizing only too late that I probably should have kept that to myself.
His face blackened completely. Of course. It was only a few months ago that Eric and I had explicitly been warned about the dangers of procreating. The man was a eugenicist monster, so dead-set against the mingling of his own gene pool with his sworn enemy’s that he had absolutely forbidden our marriage. I hadn’t really believed that song and dance…until now.
“Daughter,” he said again as he seethed at the ultrasound machine. “So you and your ‘paramour’ have done your very best to flout my orders.”
“Your orders don’t mean shit,” I snapped. Fuck. Why hadn’t I allowed Tony to come back here with me? What in the hell had these goons done to him?
His dark, deceptively hazel eyes—so unnervingly like mine—narrowed. “Is that right? And how is the de Vries spawn taking it while he rots in jail?”
“You didn’t really think that was going to last, did you?” I cut back. “Those were trumped-up charges, and you know it. It’s over. He’s getting out now that they moved the trial away from your bribed prosecutor and corrupt judge.”
Carson smiled then, and the sight of it turned me to ice. He was the human incarnation of the Grinch about to steal Christmas. The clear, perverse pleasure he took in orchestrating Eric’s stay at Rikers Island was bone-chilling.
“Perhaps,” he admitted. “But it accomplished its purpose, did it not?”
I frowned. “How do you figure?”
“Well,” he said. “You are here. Your worthless renegade of a husband”—he practically spat the word—“is not.”
Realization sank in my heart like an anchor. Of course. This had been his plan all along. Separate us. Just like Eric said.
But in order to do what?
Before I could ask, Carson held up a hand, and with the flick of his fingers, gestured his henchmen inside the crowded space.
“Your mother is alive,” he informed me, like he was telling me the state of the weather. “But if you care about her life at all, you’ll come with me. Quietly and obediently, if that’s even possible for you. Now.”
Interlude I
1997
“Come now, hen. Jake is gone. It’s time to move on, and I have been very patient.”
“Don’t call me that, John.”
The voices filtered up the stairs to Eric’s suite on the second floor of the townhouse. He put down the book he was reading and got up to listen. He had found a cache of J.D. Salinger novels a few weeks ago and had been tearing through them, just like he did with all the books in his father’s abandoned study. But right now, Holden Caulfield could wait.
A year ago, unannounced visitors were a common thing. His parents had been the center of a thriving social scene on the Upper East Side. If they weren’t attending formal functions at his grandmother’s penthouse or others within their social station, Jacob and Heather had hosted dinner parties themselves. Eric preferred the latter—it allowed him to sneak away with friends or even with a good book when he was finished with his meals, maybe eavesdrop on the adults from his favorite spot on the landing. He would sneak glimpses of his parents laughing in the reverie, occasionally catch a glimpse of the way Jacob would flirt with his wife when he thought others weren’t looking. They were the couple everyone wanted to be. And how proud Eric had been of the fact.
But that was before. Since Jacob’s untimely death, the townhouse had been a tomb, haunted by the ghost of Jacob’s laugh, buried by his wife and son’s sorrow.
Eric wasn’t an idiot. He knew his mother was the object of interest to the men in her social circle. A few months after the funeral, the maid had opened the door to more than one man looking for Heather. Most of them, to Eric’s relief, were turned away.
This one, however, was more stubborn. This time, Heather had come to the door before he would leave.
Eric crept out of his rooms and crouched at the top of the stairs, hidden in the shadows of the railing, but fully able to hear the conversation and watch the feet pacing the stone tiles.
There was a long chuckle. “Didn’t Jake call you that? Se
ems like someone should keep it going.”
Eric smarted. Dad called Mom a lot of nicknames—hen was just one of them.
“John…”
“I’m not afraid of ghosts, Heather. And I’m certainly not afraid of his.”
There was some more pacing. Eric caught the gleam of a black men’s dress shoe.
“I’ve waited long enough, Heather. It’s time.”
“John, please. You can’t still be angry about something that happened more than fifteen years ago. I don’t owe you anything.”
“Angry? I’m not angry. Like I told you, I’ve been very patient. Waiting for what was rightfully mine to come back to me.”
The shadows at the bottom of the steps moved.
“Let me go.” His mother’s voice was as weak as ever, but it bore a chill that Eric had never heard before.
“Not until I get the answer I want.”
“John, please. I said let me go!”
Eric didn’t wait another second. He scuttled down the stairs two steps at a time until he landed in the foyer with a crash against the big oak table in the center. The vase of roses wobbled, but didn’t fall.
The man turned. He looked vaguely familiar. Tall, with a slightly hooked nose, curly hair that was mostly a dark brown, and greenish eyes that seemed to shift in the light. Like quicksilver.
The man dropped Heather’s wrist, and she stepped back immediately.
“Ah,” said the man. “Eric. The young sea sprite. It’s nice to see you again, boy. Been a while, hasn’t it?”
Eric stepped between them, allowing his mother to wrap her fragile hand around his arm. He would have liked her to pull him back and cage his shoulders with her arms, the way she used to do when he was small. But he was too big for that now. Last summer he had had a growth spurt, and now, at nearly twelve, he was nearly five-seven, at least an inch or two above his mother. Now he had to guard her.
He was not, unfortunately, taller than this man, who seemed to loom over them both like one of the gargoyles hanging off St. John the Divine.
The man smiled. It wasn’t a nice smile. It felt like a knife was slicing down his chest. Eric pressed a hand to his sternum, but he couldn’t look away.
“Your mother and I were speaking,” said the man. “I admire a man who stands up for himself, but let’s be clear. You won’t win this fight, Triton.”
“Who’s Triton?” Eric managed. “My name is Eric. Who are you?”
But the man didn’t answer. Instead he just pushed up the sleeve of his jacket and checked his watch. It was identical to the one his father used to wear. Above that, Eric caught sight of a thin chain bracelet with a gold coin.
“This is a conversation between adults. I’ll give you one second to move,” said the man. “And then I’ll do it for you.”
Eric gulped. But his mother didn’t try to move him. She needed him. His dad, wherever he was, needed him too.
So he went against every impulse he had and met that terrible green gaze straight-on. “No.”
The man’s smirk disappeared. “Very well.”
Eric braced himself—for what, he wasn’t sure. A blow to the cheek? A twist of an arm? Something worse? But before he could find out, there was a harsh rap at the front door. Everyone froze.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” came a voice through the door. “Has all propriety evaporated? Garrett, will you please open the door since my daughter-in-law’s maid can’t be bothered to do her job?”
For once in his life, Eric was glad to hear the familiar, irritable voice sounding from the other side of the thick oak. Keys jingled, and a few seconds later, the door opened as Garrett, the old butler, held the door open for Eric’s grandmother: Celeste Annika van Dusen de Vries.
“My goodness, Heather,” she said as she walked in, brushing rain off her Burberry coat. “Is it the fashion now to force your guests to stand outside like common solicitors?”
The older woman stopped when she realized the foyer was actually full of people. Her sharp gaze sliced through the tension, landing on the visitor, John, after touching on her grandson and his mother.
“What in the world…” she muttered. “John. I don’t know what you are doing here, but you are not welcome. I thought I made that clear at the funeral.”
The man’s nasty smirk reappeared. “So you did. But this is not your home, Celeste.”
“It’s de Vries property, just like the penthouse. That didn’t change with Jacob’s passing.”
The man quirked his head, like he was measuring whether or not to continue this argument. “You can’t protect her forever, Celeste. You’re not Heather’s keeper.”
“Perhaps not,” she said evenly. “But I do have a vested interest. Much like I do in Chariot, don’t I?”
For a long time, the man didn’t speak. Grandmother glared. And much to Eric’s satisfaction, the man looked away first.
He turned to Heather. “Until we meet again, hen. Triton.” And then, with an awful, terrible wink at Eric, he left.
It took ten full breaths before Eric could even hear his mother’s voice again, waging yet another weak argument against his grandmother. Eric rolled his eyes. There was no point to arguing with Grandmother. She always won. She was a force of nature herself.
“You know why I’m here,” Celeste was saying. “You haven’t been answering my calls. Things are falling apart. And now I see that parasite in your home with Eric guarding you like a puppy? It’s a good thing I showed up when I did.”
Eric turned to find his mother falling back into one of the antique chairs in the foyer.
“Celeste.” Heather’s voice was barely above the echoes of shuffling footsteps. “Please. I just need more time. We need more time.”
“You’ve had nearly a full year.” Celeste looked at Eric. “The boy needs more guidance than he is getting. He is my sole heir. It’s time to accept the proposal and for Eric to come where he belongs.”
“Celeste, please—”
“John Carson is not going to leave the matter alone,” Celeste continued. “You know that just as well as I. Since Jacob’s death, he has become a man obsessed, and I’m sorry to say, no amount of money will put him off. You have only a few choices here. Eric will be safer with me. You will be safer married to Horace.”
Eric watched their interaction like he was witnessing a tennis match. What was happening? Safer with Grandmother? Married?
His mother’s arguments fell again and again, and with dread building in his chest, he watched her capitulate quickly, shrinking into the chair with every flattened reply.
“Come, Eric,” Celeste beckoned. “I am on my way to Westchester for the weekend.” She said the word like it was something different from what everyone else meant, with extra emphasis on the final syllable. Week-end. “Garrett will escort you to your polo practice this afternoon, and then we will return for your things.”
Eric shook his head, finding his voice at last. “No, Grandmother. I’m staying here.”
Celeste simply pressed her pink lips together and shook her head. “I’m afraid that’s out of the question, Eric. De Vrieses do not renege on their promises. Your mother made me one, and that was on your behalf.”
“It’s just a missed practice,” Eric argued. “Mom’s upset. She needs me—”
“She needs you to let her be,” Celeste cut in irritably.
“No,” Eric said, this time forcefully enough that his voice cracked. That had been happening more and more lately. “I—I know what you’re doing. This isn’t just polo, Grandmother. You’re—you’re taking me away. It’s because of that man, isn’t it? He wants something from Mom, doesn’t he?”
“Oh, Eric,” Heather murmured, shaking her head.
The older woman’s eyes narrowed. “You heard, did you? Eavesdropping is quite unbecoming of a young man like yourself, Eric. I see we have more work to do than I anticipated.” She glared at Heather, as if Eric’s shortcomings were yet another indication of her character deficienc
ies.
Talk back, Eric wanted to say to her. But instead, Heather gazed at him. She reached out like she wanted to stroke his cheek, but dropped her hand almost immediately.
“I’m afraid not,” she murmured. And then, to Celeste: “He’ll go. I’ll have his things sent tomorrow.”
Celeste nodded and turned to the door. “Very well, Eric, let’s—”
“On one condition,” Heather continued.
Celeste turned and raised a wry silver brow. “What is that?”
Heather’s gray gaze flickered nervously between her mother-in-law and her son. “He stays here. In New York.”
Celeste opened her mouth to argue back. It just wasn’t done, she would say. Every de Vries heir for generations had attended the same boarding school in Europe. What right did Heather have to break such a longstanding tradition?
But Heather rattled on with more energy than Eric had seen since the funeral, where she had collapsed across his father’s coffin just before it was lowered into the ground.
“It’s what Jacob and I planned for him,” she insisted. “He’s an American, Celeste. He belongs here. And if I’m going to give him up, I refuse to do so completely. He needs to be close to his mother. To his family. Not far away from everything he knows. I won’t let him lose that.”
Too. The word was unspoken, but there, nonetheless. On top of his father, she meant. On top of her.
Eric swallowed thickly. Part of him wanted to run to the back of the house, sneak out the fire escape he wasn’t supposed to climb on, and disappear into the city. He could leave New York, jump on one of the boxcars that his family owned. Ride away on a boat or a train or a truck and never return to this place, this city full of death and anger and sorrow.
But he knew he wouldn’t. This conversation, this family—they were like chains on his legs.
Like she was a balloon that had just expelled the last of its helium, Heather sank to the chair once again and looked on wearily as Eric fetched his coat and put on his shoes. Was this really happening?
The Love Trap (Quicksilver Book 3) Page 8